1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a character receiving and displaying pager using different types of fonts, and more particularly, to a pager capable of displaying received characters in different types of fonts and a method thereof.
2. Background Art
Conventional paging systems, which come in various levels of sophistication, are personal message receiving devices which monitor certain broadcast channel used by paging networks to alert or send information to specific subscriber units known as pagers. Exemplary configurations are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,381,132 for Method Of Displaying Self-Address Data In A Pager Receiver issued to Yun and U.S. Pat. No. 5,475,380 for Time Alarm Method Of A Radio Paging Receiver issued to Shim, both of which are assigned to the same assignee of the present invention. Each subscriber pager has an individual identification ID stored in the pager. All of the pagers in an area monitor broadcast messages from a base station including a central transmitter. Each message is intended for a particular pager and has that pager's ID associated with the message. Thus, pagers in a particular service area all monitor a certain channel, i.e., frequency for broadcasts from the pager system transmitter looking for its ID. When the ID is present, that is when the ID is broadcast by the central transmitter, the message associated with the ID, which typically follows the ID, is acted upon by the pager.
The most basic type of pager is known as a beeper. The message is simply an instruction to actuate the pager causing the pager to generate the familiar beep, illuminate an LED, or both. Another type of pager system is used to transmit numeric messages, typically a telephone number the recipient is to call. When the individual pager receives its ID, the accompanying message is typically stored in the pager and displayed on the pager's numeric display. More recent pager systems are used to transmit alphanumeric messages which include the number and/or word messages for display immediately or later. Exemplary configurations are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,020 for Data Display Radio Pager issued to Motohashi et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,481,255 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,452,356 both for Paging Transmission System issued to David, U.S. Pat. No. 5,323,148 for Selective Call Receiver Presenting The Length Of An Alphanumeric Message Prior To Presentation Of The Message issued to Olazabal et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,321,421 for Portable Electronic Device Capable Of Receiving And Transmitting Lower-Case Letter Codes While Displaying Only Upper-Case Letters issued to Nishida. Other pager systems such as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,223,831 for Ideographical Character Signalling System issued to Kung et al., are also capable of displaying ideographical characters such as languages in China, Japan, Taiwan.
In the conventional pagers which are capable of displaying alphanumeric messages including a telephone number and/or word messages, a 7-bit ISO (International Standard Organizations) character set is typically received as a word message and a data value corresponding to the received character set is read from a font read-only-memory (ROM) for a visual display of the same. For example, Korean characters are represented as a 14-bit complete code using SI and SO. Since the conventional pagers contain only one set of font to represent the characters whether the characters are in English or Korean, only one type of display is available. As a result, if the user requests to bold a part of a message or to use different font sets for decoration or emphasis of the message, the conventional pagers as available today are not equipped to handle those requests.